In our modern electronics driven world, a user of an electronics device typically has many such devices. For example, a user may own a set of devices, such as a cellphone (perhaps multiple), a PDA (personal data assistant), computers, and set-top boxes. Each device may be capable of being loaded with personal data such as contacts information, calendar schedules, and other data files. However, loading the same personal data in each of the user's devices, as the user often desires for data synchronization, can be burdensome to the user. Furthermore, if an update to the personal data is made to one device, the same update would need to be manually duplicated in the other devices to provide seamless service across all of the user's devices.
There exist methods and apparatuses that enable automatic synchronization of data across multiple electronic devices to avoid the need for the aforementioned burdensome manual synchronization. To facilitate properly-targeted automatic synchronization of personal data, each of the user's devices may be provisioned or loaded with identity information to ensure that the user's personal data is synchronized only with other the devices of the same user. For example, all devices of a single user may be loaded with identity information such as traditional crypto keys, PINs (personal identification numbers), passwords, biometric information and other authentication information such as mother's maiden name, place of birth, pet's name, etc. Once the user's devices are provisioned or loaded with the user's identity information, the user may use such information for authentication to access the devices and manually synchronize the user's personal data therein. Thus, there is a desire by the user to have the user's devices performing automatic authentication with one another so that the user's data may be automatically synchronized among the user's devices. However, of concern is the manner in which the user's devices must transmit and expose the user's identity information to other devices in order to perform an automatic device authentication. Clearly, there is a desire to provide secure identity authentication in the user devices for detection of those devices that belong to a single user so that the user's identity information therein may be used to facilitate synchronization of data across the user's devices. Furthermore, such identity information should be kept private or secure so as not to be exposed to unauthorized devices or users that may use such information to steal or otherwise retrieve data from the user's devices. Thus, as referred herein, identity authentication of a device involves the identification of a device or its user based on identity information contained therein for the purpose of authorizing the device to perform one or more functions, such as data synchronization with another device. Proper identity authentication is important to the future of seamless mobility because it is a crucial element for secure communications between devices.